To no one's surprise, congressional Democrats are charging their Republican counterparts with brazen political opportunism. Mr Holder dismissed the vote as “an election-year tactic”. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, says it's all an effort to prevent Mr Holder combating voter-ID requirements alleged to suppress Democratic voter turnout. And maybe they're right. Does it matter? An executive branch agency's scheme to hand over an arsenal of guns to drug gangs is a serious thing. Especially when some of those guns show up at the scene of a murdered border-patrol agent. Questionable motives are irrelevant to the question of whether, in this case, the legislative branch ought to assert its authority to fully oversee the executive branch's attempts to enforce its laws. And they're irrelevant to the question of whether, in this case, the executive branch ought to attempt to prevent Congress from doing its job by asserting executive privilege. When he was a senator, Mr Obama was against this sort of resistance to executive transparency. As David Nakamura of the Washington Postreports:

In 2007, Obama, then a senator with higher ambitions, chided President George W. Bush for employing his executive authority to block then-senior White House adviser Karl Rove from testifying before Congress in a scandal involving the firing of nine U.S. attorneys.

Speaking to CNN host Larry King, Obama declared that the Bush administration had a tendency to “hide behind executive privilege every time there's something a little shaky that's taking place.”

Obama urged Bush to consider “coming clean,” adding that “the American people deserve to know what was going on there.”

He was right then, and he would be right to say the same thing now. The executive has taken far too much power from the legislative branch, much to the detriment of democratic principles. I don't much care why in a particular case Congress wishes to assert it's prerogatives against the executive. Whenever it finds the motivation, I'm for it. So this is an election-year ploy I'm happy to see. The people's representatives in government have a right to the information they need to hold the agents of the state accountable. They've asked. The executive has an obligation to comply. It's that easy.

Generally, we put too much weight on motivation. Recently Newt Gingrich criticised Mr Obama's decision to suspend efforts to deport undocumented immigrants who came to America as children, calling it an "election-year gimmick". “If the president has the power to do that", Mr Gingrich asked, "why didn't he do it three years ago?” The answer is that three years ago, House Republicans had yet to block the DREAM Act. But, sure, Mr Obama could have put mini-DREAM into place in January of 2011, and that would have spared some significant number of innocent, educated, law-abiding undocumented immigrants from deportation. So why didn't he? No doubt for the reason Mr Gingrich is fishing for: Mr Obama gets a bigger electoral boost doing it nearer the election. It was certainly cold of Mr Obama to ruin some lives playing the electoral angle, but that's just how politics works. When the grubby self-interest of politicians happens to align with the public interest, we shouldn't complain that they're acting for wrong reasons. We should just be grateful that they ever find it in themselves to do the right thing. Never mind why.

W.W., Fast and Furious was certainly a serious error that's well-within Congress' oversight remit. However, the documents it's currently requesting do not cover Fast and Furious itself, but have to do with the Justice Department's response to Congressional inquiries. These are the sort of documents generally protected by executive privilege, though the plausibility that they contain evidence of obstruction of Congress could remove that protection.

Also, I think that you're a bit too insouciant regarding Issa's motives here. I do agree that those motives are irrelevant to the question of Holder's guilt or innocence, and to the question of whether the documents are covered by executive privilege. However, those motives are very relevant when it comes to the question of Issa's job performance. Using the organs of state for primarily political aims is itself misconduct, even when such behavior uncovers misconduct by others.

"If someone breaks into my house and feeds his children with my food, the children may be 'innocent,' but they need to leave as well."

The analogy doesn't really work. In your hypothetical, the children simply take your food. In the DREAM Act (or in "mini-DREAM"), people who are either actively contributing to the country, or are on the cusp of doing so, are offered a temporary reprieve from deportation. Please find a better analogy.

I'm not usually a pedant, but your use of "illegal" as a noun to mean "undocumented immigrant" or "illegal immigrant" is annoying. It ignores the fact that we are speaking about a person. Would you label someone who drives above the posted speed limit an "illegal"? He or she broke the law, right?

Not undocumented. Illegal. If someone breaks into my house and feeds his children with my food, the children may be 'innocent,' but they need to leave as well.

No doubt the Economist would be against building a wall and stopping illegal immigration in the first place, and they're against enforcing the law once they get away with it. Of course, no one at the Economist will lose their job to an illegal, and their cheap slave labor just keeps prices down and profits up.

Many of these Republicans who are DISMAYED Obama is not respecting Congressional Authority happily backed Republicans George W Bush and Dick Cheney when they gave Democratic House members the cold shoulder in response to their requests for information about executive branch activities.

The Constitution put Congress in charge. 2/3 each of both House and Senate is omnipotent. Removal of Executive and Judicial Branch officers requires only a majority in the Senate after 2/3 of the House impeaches. But only a chamber of Congress can remove one of its own members.
Executive Privilege can be legitimate, but it has more often been abused. It ultimately depends upon the specific content of the documents. Certainly, it is suspicious when invoked against an investigation of what seems a real screw-up.

We elect people to do our will and complain when they do because their motives are impure?

Yes, we want oversight but there's room for confidential communications. We want government officials speaking candidly with each other without the fear that their words will be used by partisans to ruin careers. Having said that, in this case there's reason to believe some of those documents contain proof of a cover-up.

I read somewhere that this sort of thing has historically been negotiated but with this recalcitrant Congress that seems unlikely. Will it get to impeachment?

Legislative power has been assumed by the Executive branch, because our Legislative branch can no longer legislate. It requires compromise, an action that has been lost in their personality profiles.
if the GOP Tea Party was concerned about the general welfare of the nation, the Senate transportation billed passed with 87 votes would be brought up for a floor vote.

I disagree with your view that we give too much attention to motivation in this case. The motivations of House Republicans shed light on how they would most likely use the DoJ documents if they got them.

Consider the Obama administration's key counterclaim to Issa and the House Justice Committee's request for documents - that many of the documents have internal deliberations of DoJ officials and that making them public would make officials constantly watch their backs in future decisions. A 'motivation-free' evaluation of this claim would lead to ignoring it. Congress is simply exercising its legitimate powers here and will presumably focus its attention on how decisions in Fast and Furious were reached, so that ATF can be more intelligent in the future and any malfeasance by ATF officials in FF will be brought to light.

In reality, once you consider the motivations present in this election year, Issa and the committee would be far more motivated to cherry pick through the documents for anything damaging to Holder and thus to Obama's reelection prospects - regardless of whether that has anything to do with the public interest/improving the ATF's operations. That really would freak out officials all over the executive branch who could reasonably fear they might be next. So Obama's counterclaim clearly has some truth to it.

If Issa were really going to "fully oversee the executive branch" and its actions in FF using these documents I would agree with W.W.- even if he was acting partly from partisan motives. But I put it to you that his oversight would be far more likely to be narrow and purely partisan rather than full and in the public interest. Why should Obama give his foes ammunition when there is clear precedent for withholding these kind of internal debate type documents? What about the current Congressional leadership lends any credence to the view that they will use these documents responsibly?

I will grant that this is a cynical view of Congress that reflects my lack of confidence in our most democratic of institutions. Also I tend to believe Holder when he says that there was no high level improprieties - if any truly juicy evidence of this existed it would surely have leaked by now. I can see how a more conservative person would distrust Holder and support an more rigorous inquiry. But I just don't see how giving Issa and the House memos they will likely misuse will in any way help restore public confidence in Congress or advance the public interest.

The thing that gets me about all this is that we know many of the guns used in Mexico come from the states. This is clear. It makes some sense to allow these straw purchases so as to track guns up the networks, but without help from Mexico, on what planet could that have been possible? And the first time or call me crazy, 10th time the guns went missing, might not the ATF have concluded that this wasn't working?